I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a writer', 'I'm an artist'. Too much is made of the role and not enough of the work. We are such a celebrity-driven age and a status-driven age, that the status becomes more important than the actual work.

Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.

Murder and hate are as deeply buried in the human heart as love, perhaps more so, and in truth they're rather entwined, and if you tried to separate them, you'd be missing something important and human.

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.

Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.